Pluck, ring, tap and strum to your heart's content

GO ART

A wind instrument made from the horn of an African ox. A sitar made from a turntable and a sprinkler head. A violin with a vibrating horn made for early, primitive recordings.

They are three of the stars of "Unplugged," a Moravian College exhibition of musical instruments that double as sculptures. Nearly all the nearly 50 art objects are acoustic. All are ready for playing by viewers. Which means that from today through Dec. 5 Moravian's Payne Gallery will be a concert hall for the craziest orchestra around.

"Unplugged" is curated by Paul Larson, a Moravian music professor and archivist for the Bach Choir of Bethlehem. It's the second time he's profiled the aesthetics of instruments. In 2000 he organized a Moravian exhibit of square pianos from rural Pennsylvania in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some were made by Moravians in Bethlehem and Nazareth; one was built in London and found in Easton.

Larson supplemented the pianos with original scores played on the instruments and paintings of their makers and owners. He's made "Unplugged" a similar sense-surround experience with abstract pictures of musicians in motion and musical forms by the late Bethlehem resident Margaret Cantieni, a family friend, violinist and avid supporter of the Chamber Music Society of Bethlehem. Of particular interest is a watercolor illustrating Bach's double violin concerto.

As in 2000, Larson is using unusual instruments to explore music's shifty history. The sitar, created by Allentown resident Ken Butler, represents the found-object movement. Along with another exhibit item, a digeridoo made from Home Depot materials, it's a cousin of recycled-junk sculpture built by visual artists who are self-taught and visionary.

The ox horn, owned by a local musician, is a replica of a Renaissance instrument used in an early-music ensemble. Larson showcases plastic recorders and a from-a-kit harpsichord to document the revival of "authentic" re-creations of original instruments for works premiered in the medieval and baroque eras.

The violin that resembles a weird gramophone designed by Marcel Duchamp is one of many hybrids patented by Augustus Stroh in 1899 for wax-cylinder recordings. The horn and ear trumpet served as vibration conductors, making the phonofiddle louder, tighter and stranger than a violin with a conventional wooden body. A guest on www.diepunyhuman.com, Meredith Yayanos, says her Stroh imitates "a human voice playing through a hand-cranked Victrola" and "a saxophone strangling a cat."

Stroh's contraptions stood out in '20s-'30s dance bands. They still stand out in Central European folk groups. Larson discovered them while reading a defunct quarterly, Experimental Musical Instruments.

He definitely has an affinity for quixotic performances of exotic instruments. In the '60s he attended avant-garde performances in Germany, where he was teaching at an Army elementary school in Frankfurt, where Stroh was born in 1828. The Moravian teacher has fond memories of onstage piano smashing and head shaving.

During tonight's opening reception, Larson will make like John Cage, playing piano "prepared" with foreign objects among the strings. He'll share the bill with painter William Christine and Christine's son, Peter, who will draw during a concert by Satori, the versatile chamber ensemble. Peter Christine also will play a water phone, a brass cylinder containing water and played with bow or mallet.

The next concert, on Wednesday, will feature Ken Butler playing his found-object instruments and Hereford Township sculptor Val Bertoia playing his and his father's metal sound sculptures.

One of Larson's goals is to establish the late Harry Bertoia as a serious musician, not just someone who made, played and recorded clustered rods that conjure breezes and tides.

Larson considers Bertoia a spiritualist who let nature activate his instruments, much like gong and metallaphone players in a Balinese gamelan orchestra ("Unplugged" has a Balinese percussion battery commissioned by Larson's niece, who was doing doctoral field work in Bali).